Under many circumstances, it is extremely easy to get temporary emergency child custody orders. Unfortunately, that ease leaves ex parte orders open for misuse and abuse. Often, as in our case, they are sought for malicious purposes and are outright fraud upon the court.

A few months prior to the court fraud, Frank, my ex, initiated in late 2010, he attempted to illegally restrain us via an ex parte order in his own city. Our five-year-old daughter and I were there, from out of state, on a fairly long visit — between two and three weeks, I think. The day we were to fly home, he grabbed her and ran out the door. I was unable to catch him or reach him by phone. We missed our flight. Around six that evening, they returned, accompanied by two police officers. I was handed court papers and told to read them carefully. I had been restrained from removing “the child from the home state.”

The home? It wasn’t our home. She and I hadn’t lived in that state for over two years, yet we were stuck there, by court order, against our will. It was my first taste of bullying via proxy. My ex, grinning ear to ear with pride, had just learned the art of using family court to inflict crippling blows. At the time, I had no idea that there were many more blows to come. As Frank visibly salivated, I flipped through the puzzling papers a couple more times and headed to the spare bedroom with my daughter.

He left his apartment an hour later. We left, too, and checked into a hotel. I needed an attorney, but it was a Friday evening, so I remained bewildered for days. On Monday we retained an attorney and gathered up, via fax and email, everything that proved we resided in a different state and headed to the court house to have the fraudulent order quashed.

His attorney (from a well-known father’s rights firm) was there alone because my ex had suddenly become unreachable. The judge was upset about the fraud, but, naturally, there were no repercussions for Frank. His attorney, also displeased, was apologetic and kept saying, “I had no idea.” He would no longer represent him. The order was indeed quickly quashed. We purchased new airline tickets and flew home the next day.

A couple days later, Frank shrugged the whole thing off with an “It’s no big deal. I knew you’d have it quashed” spiel and immediately got to work on his next scheme. And, heck, why not? He had just learned that he could commit court fraud and remain unscathed . . . and ex parte orders were only one of many weapons in the family court arsenal.

Until 2010, I never would have believed it was possible to perpetrate drastic fraud upon a court of “law” and suffer no consequences. I also never would have believed that family courts could be used to pull off kidnappings without repercussions. After it happened to us, I thought for sure we were the only ones. I have since discovered that the trickery and blatant law-breaking my ex used in his scheme has, in fact, been used in other parental child abductions as well. In retrospect, we were some of the luckier folks. Often — depending on who they’re up against, what their financial situation is, or how corrupt the judge is — there is little or no recourse for victims of court-assisted kidnappings. Some parents never see their kids again, and others end up with absurdly restricted visitation rights.

We had been separated for almost three years when, without warning, my ex decided to sue for full custody of our five-year-old daughter. Unfortunately, he also decided not to tell me about it. Furthermore, he decided I should not be privy to it in any way, shape, or form. He knew that his chances of prevailing in court were 100% if I didn’t even show up. Boom.! Victory by default.

Here is how he did it:

1. He hired a lawyer in a state where neither of us live. He lied to the lawyer by telling her he lived there. He provided her with a false address for me — to ensure that I would never receive documents or letters from her or the court.

2. He filed for custody in that state.

3. He came to my state under the guise of a visit.

4. During the “visit” he stayed at a Super 8 motel in our county (not one of the nicer Super 8’s), befriended the motel clerk, and persuaded her to let him use the motel address as my home address. He instructed her to hold all mail that would eventually start arriving in my name. He had previously provided his attorney with that address by telling her it was my home address. The attorney did not even realize it was a motel.

5. Two days after his arrival, he flew an illegal immigrant acquaintance from Seattle to here (a long journey). The acquaintance spoke poor English and may not have understood that he was being used for something illegal.

6. He took his acquaintance to a fly-by-night, 24-hour notary business and had him sign the service of process form claiming he, the acquaintance, had served me the court papers. (My state has lax notary laws, which helped make it impossible for me to track down the guy.)

7. A couple days later, my ex flew home.and I remained clueless about the pending action.

8. Three months later, he went to the hearing in the state where he had filed the custody action. Of course, I was not there, and, of course, he was awarded full custody by default. I was granted occasional supervised visits and ordered to pay child support (By the way,I had never sought child support from him). The basis for the ruling was described as an inability of the parties to make child rearing decisions. There was no negative mention of me or my parenting, nor an explanation for why the commissioner thought it was in my child’s best interest to have such ridiculous visitation restrictions with me. When granting default judgments, family courts will pretty much give the petitioner whatever they want.

9. Fraudulently-obtained custody order in hand, he immediately flew to my state, pretending to be here for another visit. He stayed at the same icky Super 8.

10. During an overnight visit, he checked out of the motel at 4am. He boarded, with our daughter, a four hour flight to Seattle.

11. That afternoon, before leaving work, I phoned to tell him I’d be there in an hour. His reply was: “Don’t freak out! We’re in Seattle. I had to come back right away for a work project, but I’ll bring her back in four days.” I did freak out. I should probably mention that he was unemployed and had been for at least two years. In addition, he was living in Section 8 housing and fraudulently receiving benefits by claiming our daughter lived with him. I did not know about the illegal benefits at that time. Somehow, he was able to fund all of his travels and legal (illegal) undertakings in addition to future costs.

So, that’s how he did it. He used the family court to perpetrate a secret “legal” kidnapping, and he had our daughter with him across the country.

I was panic-stricken. I knew he planned to remove her from the U.S., so I needed to somehow find help immediately. That same day, as well as the next, I called everyone I could think of for help. The police in my county, the police in his county, NCMEC, etc. I also repeatedly called my ex and begged for answers. He quickly got fed up and blurted out, “I have full custody! There is nothing you can do! She’s MINE!” He refused to provide any details. He wouldn’t say how or when or where he had obtained custody. Hours of searching online, finally earned a hit. The decree was in a third state. It was another shocking blow.

Getting my daughter back home was a three-week, rapid-fire assault. The twists and turns that occurred every step of the way were like something from a dramatic novel. I’ll just give the summarized version here, saving details for the book and, possibly, future posts. However, if you are battling a similar situation, I’ll be happy to share what I learned.

It went like this:

1. I retained an attorney in the state where the ruling had been made. The custody order was set aside and was no longer valid.

2. I retained an attorney in my home state and got an emergency custody order from my local family court.

3. I flew across the country to his state, but discovered my out-of-state order was not “valid enough” there to get help from the police.

4. With the help of yet another attorney, we had a hearing in my ex’s city, and I received the necessary local orders to have my daughter returned to me.

Getting her back was the biggest relief I’ve ever felt in my life. It had been a very close call, as he had been hard at work, the entire time, arranging her permanent trip out of the U.S. My daughter hadn’t been put in school while he had her — all the while she missed out on three weeks of school here at home. She was returned to me in old, dirty clothes, hadn’t had her hair washed during the entire three weeks, and only received one bath. The used-looking shoes she had on were unfamiliar to me and were too small. She was emotionally traumatized from having no contact with me and from being told she would never see me again. She had also been forbidden to mention me or cry about missing me, and was told I had been put in prison for life. She had many nightmares while there, but was chastised for that too. She was informed that she would soon be living overseas with her grandparents and was forced to quickly try learning a new language. My ex had sold most of his furniture and possessions. He didn’t look for a job. He had no intention of keeping her in the country. Though unemployed and no longer taking classes, he spent his days running errands to arrange for their departure. He tried leaving her at a daycare, but had to quickly stop because she kept telling everyone to call 911. She spent almost every day alone with a friend of his — a strange, angry Muslim radical who lived in a dirty, pay-by-the-week (or by the hour) motel and prayed all day long. It was a terrifying, confusing time for her.

Most people might assume this type of fraudulent behavior results in some sort of punishment, but there were no negative consequences for my ex’s perjury and outright deception on the court. A prosecutor would have had to pursue it, and prosecutors have no incentive to get involved in such family court travesties. Until a crooked ruling results in death, they turn a blind eye. Most people might also assume that any future custody proceedings between my ex and me resulted in easily-obtained, sensible decisions based — at least partially — on my ex’s twisted history and disregard for the courts (this wasn’t his first bold case of court fraud). Most people, however, probably assume wrong. My ex relentlessly continued his war against us, eventually hiring an unethical attorney who knew how to use his negative history as a dirty court tactic, and I learned far more than I’d hoped about corruption and cruelty in the family court arena as I fought to prevent an international abduction.

]]>https://releasethelions.wordpress.com/2015/05/21/the-draconian-sub-society-of-family-court-part-ii-fraud-perjury-kidnapping/feed/18767655clarneec89385793The Draconian Sub-Society of Family Court. Part I — The Guardian ad Litemhttps://releasethelions.wordpress.com/2015/05/19/the-draconian-sub-society-of-family-court-part-i-the-guardian-ad-litem/
https://releasethelions.wordpress.com/2015/05/19/the-draconian-sub-society-of-family-court-part-i-the-guardian-ad-litem/#respondTue, 19 May 2015 12:58:49 +0000http://releasethelions.wordpress.com/?p=84]]>

Rita was a vile, unhappy woman who earned extra money influencing custody cases in a Western Washington county. Though she was highly qualified at being hateful and hyper-opinionated, she was not the slightest bit capable of being a guardian ad litem. She didn’t care that she wasn’t capable, however, because she didn’t care about the well-being of children.

She was a social worker, technically qualifying her to be a GAL, but her cold, hard heart was enough to make her dangerous. I’m not sure why she chose to get into social work, but I suspect its avenue into the personal lives of others helped satisfy her appetite for tormenting people she disliked.

Her goal as a GAL was to collect money while doing as little actual work as possible and get some personal satisfaction shaming parents who rubbed her the wrong way. She was a lonely, plump, aging divorcee and, unlike contented women of her age, found inadequate joy in hobbies, family, and other life treats. Though she spent her personal time parading around at hippy festivals, smoking weed, and playing the part of social activist, she needed the GAL gig to quench her corrupt ego. She was a has-been who never was, and she blamed an assortment of people, groups, and belief systems. Fortunately for her, she was in a position to punish many of them and get paid for it. It was – and is – a miserable bitch’s dream job . Little work, lots of wicked fun, and zero accountability.

She savored her stranglehold on frazzled, terrified parents — an all too common trait of family court vendors. When someone has a child’s safety in their hands, they are in the position of oppressor if they so choose. Even tough, strong-willed people, if their child’s safety is threatened, will cower like beaten dogs. Having an unethical or sociopathic guardian ad litem assigned to them is like having their own personal Kim Jung Un because there is no bigger threat to loving parents than the possibility of their children being put in danger. Parents in such situations are often already weakened, emotionally and financially, when they find themselves at the mercy of someone much like the exes they left.

When speaking on the phone to arrange our first meeting, Rita was friendly, but with detectable effort. A few nights later, we met face to face in an empty office building after business hours. She put her paperwork and laptop on the board room table and spent ten minutes or so feigning professionalism. After that, all I saw were fangs.

She hum hawed around at first and used little time or energy discussing important things or asking pertinent questions. I could see that something was eating at her. Less than twenty minutes into our debut encounter, she pounced. “Pennsylvania is a very conservative state. You do realize that, don’t you?” Clearly, it was an admonishment. She might as well have said that Pennsylvania was full of satanists and everyone there ate live puppies for breakfast.

I immediately realized my ex or one of his cohorts had used Rita’s passion for liberalism as a weapon against me. “Actually, it’s a blue state,” I politely replied.

She refused to acknowledge her ignorance, opting to spout off spontaneously made-up nonsense. “Well . . . only recently!” She yelled, in the tone of a snotty twelve-year-old. “But still, it is actually very conservative.”

“The county I live in is conservative, yes, but most of the state is not,” I explained. I kept my tone as upbeat as possible and forwent explaining that Pennsylvania was historically liberal, not recently so. My daughter’s safety and future was, tragically, now in Rita’s hands, so no matter how badly I wanted to tell her where she could shove her cheap, unprofessional comments, I tried to keep wearing a friendly attitude.

She used a covert eye-roll from her arsenal of implied insults and tried to scorn me by bringing up the state where I was born and raised. “Missouri is very conservative too. You can’t deny that!”

“Yes. It is,” I agreed.

Rita sure had some mental problems, and I had become her newest target. She went silent for several seconds while viewing her laptop screen and, without looking up, announced, “Missouri has a really big meth problem.” In other words, You’re as dirty and disgusting as a meth head because…. GEOGRAPHY!

In my mind, I was screaming a gunnery sergeant’s famous line from a popular war movie, which likely led to my tit for tat response. “This area is known for its drug problems.”

“Oh, it is not!” she shouted. “That just isn’t true! We don’t have any drug problems here!”

I shit you not. She really said that, which meant she was either a complete dumbass in denial or a lying liar telling lies through her lying lie-hole. In the Western Washington county where our bizarre meeting was being held, meth had become a heavy burden. Heroin as well. The drug problem there caused significant and frequent property crime and led to a huge increase in homelessness. Public bathrooms were locked up more often than not, and some even had sharps containers in them. Nearly everyone who hadn’t experienced a purse-snatching, car theft, or burglary, first-hand, knew someone who had. They absolutely had a regional drug problem. Everyone there knew it and was forced to deal with it, and Rita damn well knew it too.

Someday, by the way, I will indeed let her know that the best part of her ran down the crack of her mama’s ass and ended up a brown stain on the mattress. Mark my words.

After she finished insinuating that I was an evil Republican who was somehow geographically connected to a meth problem, she retrieved some documents from a folder and attacked my personal character with a barrage of puzzling, angry questions. Still, nothing made sense, and her disgusting bias became more and more obvious throughout the mind-boggling ordeal. Each question was as baffling as the next.

She looked up from the pile of documents. “Why did you move back to Washington in 2010?”

“What? I didn’t.” By that point, I had already denied a slew of odd, furious accusations as well as long, silent glares.

She jabbed a finger at one of the documents. “You said so right here!”

That only added to my confusion. “What? No. Where are you getting this stuff?”

“Here!” she shouted, slamming her finger back at the document. “You wrote it!”

I looked at the document and realized why I had been accused of unexplainable and self-incriminating statements. “Oh….You’re using Frank’s papers. He wrote those things. And it’s all untrue.” In addition to my ex’s incoherent, contradictory lies in all of his statements, motions, and GAL forms, he hadn’t even tried to get dates or years right most of the time.

Boldly dismissive of her screw-up, she persisted. “But why did you move back in 2010?”

“I didn’t, and if you want to ask me questions about the truth, then please use my statements. My papers,” I said. “It makes no sense for you to use Frank’s words as your guide or ask me to explain why non-events happened.”

Rita ceased eye contact for a couple minutes, as she always did after making an ass of herself. She rifled through the papers, sighing a time or two, until retrieving the lengthy document I had carefully filled out at her request a couple weeks earlier. My detailed, written statements and timeline, however, quelled her enthusiasm for the interrogation, as they contained undeniable and proven facts. Fact-finding was not on her persecution agenda, so she shucked them aside within a few minutes and opted for some damaging ammo — the sworn statements of Frank’s accomplices.

Family court perjury is rarely prosecuted. By rarely, I mean it’s almost unheard of, so lying in custody-related sworn statements is commonplace. Whether or not someone decides to lie in their sworn statements depends on what their goal is and what type of person they are. If their goal is to help protect a child, they tell the truth. If their goal is to destroy one of the parents out of spite, they make up anything that comes to mind or simply agree to write whatever is requested of them.

Some of Rita’s insults were presented calmly and others in anger. She had a difficult time maintaining an air of maturity, so her childish bitterness cut through repeatedly. Often, she dramatically paused to give me the extended stink eye while pondering her next attack. Why the hell had they put this inept, crazy woman in charge of my daughter’s future? She shouldn’t be trusted with the fate of a goldfish, let alone concoct opinions regarding a child’s safety.

By the time we finished our meeting, I had endured four torturous hours with my very own Almira Gulch, but she wasn’t using her position of power to separate me from my Cairn Terrier. She was after my daughter. I left with swollen eyes and more fear than ever. On top of being sleep deprived from my cross-country flight, I was chronically withered from constant worry and hopelessness, so when Rita ditched the custody-related line of questioning and lit into me about politics, I assumed I was still napping on the plane. It was absolutely unreal. Up to that point, I had survived several years of bullying by a power-hungry ex, as well as five years of family court dumbassery that spanned three states and required twice as many attorneys. Now I would have to survive Rita.